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Back Home, with Debian!

Thursday 14 January 2010 by Bradley M. Kuhn

By the end of 2004, I'd been running Debian ‘testing’ on my
laptop since around early 2003. For almost two years, I'd lived with
periodic instability — including a week in the spring of 2003 when
I couldn't even get X11 started — for the sake of using a
distribution that maximally respected software freedom.

I'd had no trouble with ‘potato’ for its two year lifespan,
but after 6-8 months of woody, I was backporting far too much and I
couldn't spare the time for upkeep. Running ‘testing’ was
the next best option, as I could pin myself for 3-6 months at a time on
a particularly stable day and have a de-facto “release”.
But, I slowly was unable to spare the time for even that work, and I was
ready to throw up my hands in surrender.

At just about that time,
a thing called
‘warty’ was released. I'd already heard about this
company, Canonical, as they'd tried earlier that year to buy a domain
name I technically own (canonical.org), but had long since given over to
a group of old friends. (They of course had no interest in selling such
a “hot property”). This new distribution, Ubuntu, was
Debian-based, and when installed, it “felt” like Debian.
Canonical was committed to a six-month release schedule, so I said to
myself: well, if I have to ‘go corporate’ again, I might
as well go to something that works like the distribution I prefer.
And so, my five year stint as an Ubuntu user began.

Of course, I hadn't always been a Debian user. I started in 1992 with
SLS
and quickly moved to Slackware. When the pain of that got too great, I
went “corporate” for a while back then, too. I
used Red Hat
Linux from early 1996 until 1998. I ultimately gave up Red Hat
because the distribution eventually became focused around the
advancement of the company. They were happy to include lots of
proprietary software — indeed, in the later 1990s, Red Hat CDs
typically came with as many as two extra CDs filled with proprietary
software. Red Hat (the company) had earlier made some efforts to
appease us harder-core software-freedom folks. But, by the late 1990s,
their briefly-lived RMS (aka Red Hat Means Source) distribution had
withered completely. By then, I truly regretted my 1996 decision to go
corporate, and fell in love quickly with Debian and its community-led,
software-freedom-driven community. I remained a Debian user from 1998
until 2004.

But, by the end of 2004, the pain of waiting for ‘sarge’
was great. So, for technical reasons only, “going
corporate” again seemed like a reasonable trade-off. Ubuntu
initially looked basically like Debian: ‘main’ and
‘universe’ were FaiF, ‘restricted’ was like
‘non-free’.

Sadly, though, a for-profit, corporate-controlled distribution can
never remain community-oriented. A for-profit company is eventually
always going to put the acquisition of wealth above any community
principle. So it has become with Ubuntu, in my view. The time has come
(for me, at least) to go back to a truly community-oriented,
software-freedom-respecting distribution. (Hopefully, I'll also never
be tempted to leave again.)

I didn't take this decision lightly, and didn't take it for only one
reason. I've gone back to Debian for three
(now) seven specific reasons:

UbuntuOne's
server side system is proprietary software with no prospects of
liberation. This has been exacerbated since Canonical now
heavily focuses on strong integration of UbuntuOne into the desktop for
the Lucid release. It seems clear that one of Canonical's top goals is
to convince every Ubuntu user to rely regularly on new proprietary
software and services.0

The line between ‘restricted’ and
‘main’ has become far too blurry. I was very glad
when I first saw Ubuntu's “you're about to install restricted
drivers” warning window, and I find that a good way to
deal with the issue. However, there are many times (particularly during
initial install) when Ubuntu doesn't even inform the user that
proprietary software has been installed. I realize that there's a
reasonable trade-off between (a) making someone's hardware work (so they
don't think Microsoft is better merely because “it works”)
and (b) having a fully FaiF
system. However, this trade-off is only
reasonable when the users are told clearly that they own hardware made
by vendors opposed to software freedom. If the users never know, how
will they know what hardware to avoid in the future?

Sometimes, after all, an open-source project is absolutely the wrong
choice for a customer … The path forward is open source, not free
software. Sometimes that openness will mean embracing Microsoft in order
to meet a customer's needs.

I would not want to run a distribution led by someone who believes
proprietary software and FLOSS are equally legitimate. As a side note, I
also find it quite bizarre that Canonical would hire someone to run its
operations whose past statements clearly disagree with
closing Ubuntu Bug
1. (Also, Matt
Asay said
in an interview that Canonical has a goal of deploying more
proprietary application software.)

(Updated on 2010-02-17: As can be seen above, my mere list of three
reasons posted just one month ago has now more than doubled! It's as if
Canonical made a 2010 plan to “do less software freedom”,
and is executing it with amazing corporate efficiency.
As Queen
Gertrude says in Hamlet, One woe doth tread upon
another's heel, so fast they follow.)

When considering all this and taking a step back and look at the status
of major distributions, my honest assessment is this: among the two
primary corporate-controlled-but-dabbling-in-community-orientation
distributions (aka Fedora and Ubuntu), Fedora is clearly much more
software-freedom-friendly. Nevertheless, since I've twice gone
corporate and ultimately regretted it, I decided it was time to go back
home — back to Debian.

So, during the last week of 2009, I took nearly two full days off to
reinstall and configure my laptop from scratch with lenny. I've thus
been back on Debian since 2010-01-01. Twelve days in, I am very
impressed. Really, all the things I liked about Ubuntu are now
available upstream as well. This isn't the distribution I left in 2004;
it's much better, all while being truly community-oriented and
software-freedom-respecting. It's good to be home. Thank you, Debian
developers.

0 For more information on the
danger that proprietary network services pose to software freedom, please
see
the Franklin
Street Statement.

Both previously and presently, I have been employed by and/or done work for various organizations that also have views on Free, Libre, and Open Source Software. As should be blatantly obvious, this is my website, not theirs, so please do not assume views and opinions here belong to any such organization. Since I do co-own ebb.org with my wife, it may not be so obvious that these aren't her views and opinions, either.